Head In The Sand (HITS)

Your chat window. Your choice of what appears in it.

Head In The Sand is a lightweight WoW Forever addon that hides unwanted chat messages before they appear in your chat window. Whether you’re tired of repetitive item-link jokes, advertising phrases, or messages written in languages you don’t read, HITS gives you a simple way to control what you see.

If you don’t want to see it, stick your head in the sand.

Things I’d Rather Not See

Build your own list of words and phrases to filter. When a message contains a matching entry, HITS hides the entire message.

• Add words or phrases through the settings panel.
• Browse your entries in an easy-to-read, scrollable list.
• Remove individual entries with a click.
• Choose whether matching ignores capitalization.
• Choose whether to search the displayed text inside WoW links.

HITS starts with a couple of commonly requested exclusion words on the list. You can remove either entry or add your own.

Matching uses literal substrings rather than patterns. For example, wts boost matches a message containing that phrase, and thunderfury can match the name inside an item link. Shorter entries can also match parts of longer words.

Where Should HITS Look?

Use channel checkboxes to choose where your word and phrase filters apply.

Supported sources include:

• General, Trade—including Trade (Local)—Trade (Services), and LocalDefense
• Say and Yell
• Party, Raid, Raid Warning, and Instance chat
• Guild and Officer chat
• Whispers and Battle.net whispers
• Emotes and other/custom channels
• Public channels, Say, and Yell have word filtering enabled by default. Group, social, and private channels start unchecked, so you can decide whether to filter those conversations too.

Language Filters

Separate toggles let you hide messages containing Chinese/Han, Korean/Hangul, or Russian/Cyrillic characters, which includes names as well as messages.

These filters apply globally across supported player chat, including groups and whispers. The channel checkboxes control word and phrase filtering; they do not limit language filtering.

HITS detects characters rather than identifying a message’s language. Han characters are also used in Japanese kanji and Korean Hanja, so messages containing those characters may be hidden too. Romanized Chinese or Korean written with Latin letters is not detected.

Simple Settings, Saved Automatically

Type /hits or /headinthesand to open the configuration panel.

Changes take effect immediately, and your preferences are saved between sessions. Settings are shared across characters within the same WoW Forever installation.

You can also:

• Pause all filtering with the Enable HITS checkbox.
• Display a count of messages hidden during the current session.
• Enable notices when settings change.
• Restore the default settings with confirmation.

HITS stays quiet by default—no notification for every message it hides.

WoW Forever Support

HITS is intended for WoW Forever. 

Filtering applies to standard chat windows. It does not filter NPC/system messages, combat logs, or chat bubbles. Separate chat interfaces provided by other addons may behave differently.

HITS only controls what appears locally. It does not ignore players, report them, or change what other people see.

Installation

1. Download the HITS release ZIP.

2. Extract the HeadInTheSand folder into WoW Forever’s Interface/AddOns/ directory.

3. Enable Head In The Sand in the AddOns menu.

4. Enter the game and type /hits to configure it.

Feedback and Troubleshooting

Found a bug or have a feature request? Please use the project’s issue tracker.

For compatibility problems, include the output of /hits debug, which shows the addon version, client build, interface number, and selected APIs.